Of course, Harrington did more than that - he did the fabulous “Night Tide” with Dennis Hopper. Here’s his obit:
Curtis Harrington, Director of Horror Films, Dies at 80
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: May 10, 2007
Curtis Harrington, who dived under his seat while watching his first horror film as a child, then went on to be a filmmaker known for his elegant, edgy cinematic forays into the macabre, died on Sunday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 80.
Robert Mundy, his longtime friend and a screenwriter, said that Mr. Harrington never fully recovered from a stroke in 2005, but that the cause of death had not been officially determined.
Mr. Harrington started as a teenage amateur filmmaker, became a force in the experimental cinema of the ’40s and ’50s, and then brought his quirky vision to the Hollywood studios. He was an actor, writer, cinematographer, assistant producer and crew member, but was best known as the director of more than two dozen brazenly scary, often intellectually provocative horror films. Time magazine called him “Poe with a megaphone.”
His first commercial feature, “Night Tide” (1961), starred Dennis Hopper , whose character begins to suspect that a woman who plays a mermaid in a carnival is a real mermaid with an intriguing twist: she kills at the full moon. In a memorable scene, the hero trails the heroine by following her wet trail.
“Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?” (1971) is a bizarre twist on the Hansel and Gretel tale in which Shelley Winters’s psychotic character searches for a “replacement” for her dead daughter, killing children along the way. The movie is notable for its vivid use of colors, particularly purple.
One of his many works for television, a 1978 movie, “Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell,” tells of a German shepherd possessed by the Devil who supernaturally causes mysterious deaths when he is not mauling people’s throats. One scene shows Dad unable to resist the urge to plunge his hand into a spinning lawnmower blade as the dog looks on gleefully.
“I have a very macabre turn of mind and there’s no way that can be explained,” Mr. Harrington told the magazine Filmmaker. “It’s just a leaning I’ve had since childhood, and I have it to this day.”
His eye for creepy detail was further suggested by the pinball machine called Turnpike, which the characters played by James Caan and Katharine Ross keep in their game room in the movie “Games” (1967). When a player wins by scoring the most fatalities, a sign lights up: “You’re a dead man.”
Curtis Harrington was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Beaumont, Calif. He begged his mother to take him to “The Raven,” with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. She claimed he hid under his seat, but he had no memory of that perhaps pivotal event. As a teenager he worked as a movie usher and made amateur films.
His “Fragment of Seeking,” shot with 16-millimeter film when Mr. Harrington was a teenager, is still cited for its adventuresome experimentalism: it was entirely visual with no dialogue.
Mr. Harrington attended Occidental College and the University of Southern California and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a film studies degree. He went to Paris, where he wrote a book about Josef von Sternberg, one of the earliest auteur filmmakers. He became part of an experimental group of filmmakers that included Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, James Whale and Bill Condon. Like other talented young directors, he became a protégé of Roger Corman, the prolific producer and director known as “King of the Bs.”
Mr. Harrington and Anaïs Nin, the author, acted in Mr. Anger’s “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,” a 1954 film that showed widely at American universities in the 1960s. In the early 1950s Mr. Harrington was an assistant to the producer Jerry Wald, then became an associate producer himself in 1955.
From the early 1960s, he directed bigger pictures with well-known actors. His 1971 picture “What’s the Matter With Helen?” starred Debbie Reynolds and Ms. Winters in a psychological horror melodrama that strikes some viewers as funny. One of his personal favorites was “Killer Bees” (1974), which starred Gloria Swanson, with whom Mr. Harrington became good friends. He directed many episodes of television shows like “Baretta” and “Dynasty.”
Mr. Harrington never married and has no immediate survivors. His last movie was “Usher,” a creative take on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” and also the subject of one of his first films.
He was not buried with a telephone, although a character discussed in “Games” was. When another character asks why that was done, the answer is, “Just in case.”
The critic Vincent Canby recorded the quotation in his review for The New York Times, then noted that “all sorts of further questions go unanswered,” as is typical for a Harrington plot.
